What you need
Your phone, access to your Google Analytics property and your Google Ads account, and ten minutes. If someone else set these up for you and you can't log in, that is the first finding: you should be able to.
Step 1: send a real test
On your phone, switch off wifi so you are on cellular, open your website, and fill in the contact form as a customer would. Use your own name with "TEST" in it, so you can find it and delete it later. Submit it. Note the time.
Why cellular: many setups exclude the office network as "internal traffic." A test from the office may be filtered out on purpose, which tells you nothing.
Step 2: look in Google Analytics
Open Google Analytics, then Reports, then Realtime. You are looking for an event named for your form: often generate_lead, form_submit, or a name your setup chose. It should appear within a minute or two.
- You see it, and it is marked as a key event. Analytics is counting your form. Move to step 3.
- You see it, but it is not a key event. The event records, but it doesn't reach the conversion reports or the ad account. Under Admin, then Events, the toggle "Mark as key event" is the setting that matters.
- You don't see it at all. The tag never saw the submit. The common reason is a form that shows an inline "thanks" message without a new page, and a tag set up to watch for a page. The other common reason is a cookie banner that silenced the tag.
Step 3: look in Google Ads
Open Google Ads, then Goals, then Conversions, then Summary. Each conversion action has a status.
- "Recording conversions." Working, at least recently.
- "No recent conversions." The tag is installed but nothing has fired for a while. If you get inquiries every week, this is a break.
- "Inactive," "Unverified," or "Tag inactive." Not counting anything. Your ad reports are running on nothing.
Your test won't show here for hours, sometimes a day or more, so the status column is what you read today. Also read the "count" column: for leads it should say one, not every. And if two actions describe the same form, check whether both are marked primary; that doubles the count.
Step 4: check for double counting
Back in Google Analytics Realtime, did your one submission produce one event, or two? Two means the tag loads twice, or two tags watch the same form. It also means the report is counting some leads twice, so its totals run high.
Step 5: write down what you found
One line per finding: "event shows in Realtime, not a key event," or "Ads status says tag inactive," or "one submit, two events." That list is most of the diagnosis, and it tells whoever fixes it where to start.
What to do with it
Some of these you can fix yourself: marking a key event is one toggle. Others mean changing a tag, a conversion action, or how the form reports success, in the right account, without breaking the counting that does work. That is the failure the conversion tracking fix covers, at one flat fee, with the plan in writing before you pay anything. Send the list above with the form and the plan is written against it.